Scheduled Mailings Stopping

[melanie]

I've been watching this for awhile....whenever we "schedule" a mailing, it stops 10-15 minutes after it is supposed to start.  It will send the first few emails, I've never kept track of exactly how many, and then it stops.  Once we resume it it's fine and never stops again.

A couple things to note:
It does this with both PHP and SMTP sending - I prefer SMTP, but tried PHP in the hopes it would work.
It doesn't happen if I just send something - I sent a mailing to over 25,000 the other day - almost triple our normal mailings, but I didn't schedule it - it worked just fine.
We have one list that sends around 400 followups each Sunday - this list stalls everytime too.

In addition - I told it to save SMTP log files so I could show them to you, but they are all blank - so it won't do either of us any good!

Thanks for your help on this - I mean, we can obviously work around this by logging into listmail 15 minutes after dailymail runs and resuming the mailing, but there have been a couple times I've forgotten and our mailing has gone out a day or two late - whenever I happen to remember.

[DW]

Greetings,

Can you show me how your cron task is set up?  Please replace your domain with "example.com" and dailymail password for security.  If you are using the "wget" utility you might want to double-check that the "-T 0" parameter is used as per the help page.  This parameter ensures that the loading of the dailymail URL by wget has an 'unlimited' timeout.  If your dailymail URL is being called another way or with another program we may need to look into a similar parameter.

You could try changing your dailymail password temporarily and setting up an alternate cron task.  You might set this up on your home or office computer if you have a dedicated connection.

If all this fails I'd wonder if your host has some rare restriction on the amount of time a cron task can run for or if there might be a particular email address only sent to during dailymail that is causing a problem.

Regards

[melanie]

Dean - we were missing the -T 0 part, so I added it in and scheduled a mailing for tomorrow at 11:00 PST (when our dailymail runs).  I'll let you know if it works or not, and if not I'll copy my cronjob task here as a reply.

Thanks

[melanie]

Well - I added the -T 0 part to the wrong line the first time, it stopped after mailing exactly 106 mailings.  I realized my mistake, added it to the right line, and it again stopped after 106 mailings.  There is no way this is a bad address, this is my test list of all my addresses (list 105).

The cronjob line currently reads:
0 11 * * * /usr/bin/wget -O /dev/null -T 0 http://www.mydomain.com/listmail/dailymail.php?pw=password' 1> /dev/null 2> /dev/null

I've sent a request to our server admin asking about the cronjob timing, but I doubt that's the issue - we've been running listmail on our new server for almost a year and this issue started a couple months ago.

[DW]

Greetings,

ListMail may be having troubles detecting a lost/closed connection and recovering. Please submit a report and enable the "Always write SMTP log" option on the Configuration page so that I might have more information when the next mailing fails.

Regards

[melanie]

I waited to respond to this until I ran the dailymail one more time.  Here are the situations I have had it fail with:

1.  Sending text only with PHP sending method - failed after 106 sent
2.  Modified cronjob to add -T 0, sent with PHP, failed after 106 sent
3.  Changed to SMTP mailing method, stopped after 101 sent.

dailymail appears to send the followup emails on other lists first, then it starts in with my test email to my test list.  It stops on different email addresses on my list, never the same one each time.  The SMTP log option is turned on, but the filesize is 0 for them - the mailing on today (12/27) has a blank log.  

One more thing - I noticed yesterday that when you do resume the mailing, it sends to the one that it stopped on twice.  I have the test list setup as a1@website.com, a2@website.com, through a500@website.com.  Today it stopped at a84@website.com (after 27 followups sent), I resumed the mailing, and received a total of 501 emails - two of them to a84@website.com.

[DW]

Hi Melanie,

The SMTP log option is turned on, but the filesize is 0 for them - the mailing on today (12/27) has a blank log.

This appears to be due to having SMTP disabled.  ListMail doesn't perform a basic check where it should when creating the log file.

One more thing - I noticed yesterday that when you do resume the mailing, it sends to the one that it stopped on twice.

In previous work with failed queues I've found this to be rare.  The "queue entry" for the user+message is removed immediately following the sending of message data to the SMTP server.  Double messages could indicate a failing MySQL connection (after sending the message the user is not able to be removed from the queue table).  I may need to output more debug information if the SMTP logs don't show anything conclusive.

Regards

[melanie]

Any update on this?  It's still happening and I have no idea what steps to take next.

[DW]

Without direct administrator access to the server my ability to investigate is, unfortunately, quite limited.  There appears to be a problem with the system utility wget (used in the cron task) running for the required amount of time.  I recommend trying some alternatives as mentioned in the following forum post:

http://listmailpro.com/forum/index.php?topic=957.0

If the timeout issue persists I recommend asking your host if there might be a hard limit on the amount of time a cron task can run.

Regards